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NATHAN ENGLANDER in conversation with CHRIS ADRIAN

September 14, 2017 - 1:00pm

Iowa City Public Library

Iowa City Book Festival Event

Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Nathan Englander will read from and discuss his latest novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth,and will be joined in conversation by fellow Workshop graduate and novelist Chris Adrian. Of Dinner at the Center of the Earth, Booklist wrote: “Equal parts political thriller and tender lamentation, the latest from Englander explores, in swirling, nonlinear fashion, Israeli-Palestinian tensions and moral conflicts . . . Ultimately, Englander suggests that shared humanity and fleeting moments of kindness between jailer and prisoner, spy and counterspy, hold the potential for hope, even peace.”

Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, as well as the novel The Ministry of Special Cases. He was the 2012 recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for What We Talk About. In 2012, Englander's play The Twenty-Seventh Man premiered at The Public Theater, and his translation New American Haggadah (edited by Jonathan Safran Foer) was published by Little Brown. He also co-translated Etgar Keret's Suddenly A Knock at the Door published by FSG. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and Madison, Wisconsin.

Chris Adrian was born in Washington, D.C. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he received his MD from East Virginia Medical School. He is the author of the novels The New World with Eli Horowitz, The Great Night, and The Children’s Hospital. His fiction has also appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares.